Happy Birthday to a Dreamer (updated)

As I was thinking about the President's 50th birthday today, I was reminded of something I read a couple of years ago about an event that happened when he was only 8 years old that changed the potential for many children like him.

Helen Cooper points out that 1969 was...

the year that America’s most prestigious universities began aggressively recruiting blacks and Latinos to their nearly all-white campuses.

Just like the passage of Title IX in 1972 has been seen by many as the groundbreaker that led to things like the US Women's Soccer Team winning the 1999 World Cup, the affirmative action of Ivy League schools has given us many of the new power elite in this country today. And these folks are shaking up the status quo. Here are just a few examples.

Barack Obama - President of the United States and graduate of Columbia and Harvard Law School

Michelle Obama - First Lady of the United States and graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School

Eric Holder - United States Attorney General and graduate of Columbia and Columbia Law School

Sonya Sotomayor - Supreme Court Justice and graduate of Princeton and Yale Law School

Deval Patrick - Governor of Massachusetts and graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School

Cory Booker - Mayor of Newark, NJ and graduate of Stanford (and Oxford) and Yale Law School

These are just the few obvious ones that I thought of from the political arena.

We might react to all of this by decrying the hold that these elite institution have on the power base of this country. That would certainly be a worthy discussion. But Cooper, in her article, explains some interesting ways that this shift is impacting our politics.

But the children of 1969 dwell in a complex world. They retain an ethnic identity that includes its own complement of cultural, historical and psychological issues and considerations. This emerged at Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings. And it emerged again last week, when Mr. Obama joked in the White House East Room that if he ran afoul of the police, “I’d get shot.” In saying this, he seemed to draw on the fears of black men across the United States, including those within the new power elite.

What Mr. Obama seemed to be demonstrating was what Mr. Lemann of Columbia calls a “double consciousness” that allows the children of 1969 to flow more easily between the world which their skin color bequeathed them and the world which their college degree opened up for them....

On Friday Mr. Obama said he hoped Mr. Gates’s incident might become a “teachable moment.” It is a daunting task for the children of 1969: finding out whether the double consciousness they honed in the Ivy League can actually get this country to listen — and react — to race in a different way.

This is the generation of African Americans that Ellis Cose in his recent book titled The End of Anger, calls "the dreamers" (as opposed to "the fighters" of the Civil Rights era who came before and "the believers" who came after). Here's how he described the dreamers:

Gen 2s (born between 1945 and 1969) did not, generally speaking, play a pivotal role in the civil rights movement. But they were, without question, the children of "the Dream." They took Martin Luther King Jr.'s words to heart and pushed America to make them come true. Gen 2 "Dreamers" were the first and second waves of African Americans to pour into universities, corporations and other institutions that previously excluded them. And many ran into a wall of prejudice once they arrived.

Here's one of the fighters reacting to the inauguration of one of the dreamers as President of the United States.

I was a distant observer until Yitzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma begin to play that sweet Shaker hymn "'Tis a Gift to Be Simple" and the camera zooms in on the smiling face of Yo-Yo Ma with his cello. His face is beaming with joy! And now the camera moves to the President-elect sitting serenely, his posture erect, his head bowed, his eyes closed, the look of a man at prayer and peace. And I lose it. Tears and vocal sobs gush up in me like a geyser of tears blocked up for years.

They are strange tears, like none other I have ever felt. It confuses me. I wonder what they're about. It feels like joy. A joy I have not felt for a long time. Joy and hope that something really new is happening. Joy that all the struggles and all the marches that wore holes in my generation's shoes on behalf of civil rights and peace have brought us to this indescribably holy moment that transcends the old divisions.

For sure, the tears that rise up in me are tears of joy. But they're also about something else. They feel like the convulsing sobs of a prisoner released from prison. They come from a hidden well of poison -- the well of deep grief stuffed away over all the years because of all the marches, all the beatings, all the blood, the well of buried anger -- the silent tears of grief over the America we had almost lost.

Then I realize: Only the appearance of joy and hope can release such deep grief. It was the joy on Yo-Yo Ma's face that finally released the poison locked inside my soul. It is the joy and hope of a new generation that's able to take us where my generation cannot -- free of the taint of sore feet and scars and old grudges the new President says we must move past.

The inauguration felt like that moment -- a kind of ritual cleansing where grief gives way to joy and hope for a better tomorrow where, in the words of Dr. Joseph Lowery's benediction, the silenced voice of his dear friend Martin once again rang out across the Washington Mall: "God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who hast brought us thus far on our way, Thou who hast by Thy might led us into the light: Keep us forever in the path."

Happy 50th Birthday to our President - a Dreamer!



UPDATE: Here's a fascinating interactive feature from The Guardian on the 50 years of President Obama's life.